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REVIEWS BY MARC LEEPSON
Back in 1995 I was blown away by Gunning for Ho, a collection
of seven very, very good short stories, most of them set
in Vietnam during the war, by H. Lee Barnes. All of them
featured precisely drawn, realistic, yet off-kilter main
characters—the hallmark of good short fiction. The
plots took off in different directions in clever, sometimes
surreal, ways. In one story, American troops and their
NVA adversaries took a long time out from the war to play
a baseball game.
Now, a dozen years later, comes Barnes’ Minimal
Damage (University of Nevada Press, 184 pp., $24.95),
another brilliant, beautifully rendered collection of short
fiction. Each piece (there are six short stories and a
terrific novella) centers on a veteran of an American war.
This time Barnes—a
former Green Beret who served in Vietnam and who teaches
English and creative writing at the Community College of
Southern Nevada—spreads the wealth. Three of the main
characters, including the guy at the center of the gripping
novella Snake Boy, are Vietnam War or era veterans; the others
fought in Panama, the first Gulf War, Grenada, and Somalia.
Aside
from a compelling main character, each of the stories has
an intriguing plot that hums along rapidly. Punishment, which
centers on a veteran of the fighting in Panama and the hours
leading to his execution on death row, is an especially taut,
tense tale. Private, which takes place at basic training
at Fort Polk, manages to shine fresh light on all the crazy-DI
tales you’ve ever heard (and experienced). Snake Boy
kept me on edge to the last sentence.
My highest compliment:
I didn’t want any of the stories
to end.
FICTION IN BRIEF
The Vietnam War is one theme of the extremely readable M.I.A. (St.Martin’s,
304 pp., $24.95), a dialogue-heavy, character-driven, thriller
novel by the Chicago crime novelist Michael Allen Dymmoch.
The book is set in the mid-eighties in a Chi-town suburb
and revolves around a 17-year-old boy and his mother. The
mom’s first husband died in Vietnam before the
boy was born; her second also served in Vietnam and was killed
doing his State Trooper duty six months before the book opens.
The
boy falls for a girl in the next town, a married cop starts
coming on to his mom, and she begins to learn more about
her new next-door neighbor.
Dymmoch tells the story creatively
and well, using very short chapters narrated by the main
characters. Things unravel a bit near the end, though, when
the mayhem includes three abrupt plot twists. That said,
the book is a very good read and contains two well-drawn
and worthy (though deceased) Vietnam veteran characters.
Dan
Guenther’s Dodge City Blues (Redburn Press,
292 pp., $14.95, paper) is a well-told in-country tale with
autobiographical elements in which a Marine lieutenant joins
forces with an Australian captain and ROK Marines against
the VC. There’s
plenty of dialogue and plenty of action and all of it seems
quite real. Guenther, a VVA member, is the author of a previous
Vietnam War novel, China Wind (1990). He served as a Marine
Corps captain in Vietnam from July 1968 to March 1970.
Page
Brown takes a fictionalized look at the origins of American
involvement in the Vietnam War in The
Unrequited (Peppertree
Press, 453 pp., $34.95), a clever and readable book that
zeroes in on the pivotal years following the end of World
War II. Brown, who served two tours in Vietnam as a platoon
leader, MACV adviser, and Vietnamese Ranger adviser, did
his homework. His book follows a series of Vietnamese and
French characters whose lives are forever altered as the
natives fight for their independence from their colonizers.
Alivia
C. Tagliaferri takes on a challenging subject in Still
the Monkey (Ironcutter Media, 315 pp., $18.95), a moving
novel about a Vietnam veteran who goes through a hellish
tour only to suffer emotionally for many years after he comes
home. The Vietnam War flashback scenes are well rendered,
as is the veteran’s interaction with a Marine who lost
both legs in the current war in Iraq.
Dennis R. Daniels’ autobiographical
novel, 359 And a Wake-Up (Fundcraft Publishing, 232 pp.,
$12.95, paper), tells the story of three characters (a West
Point LT, an SFC in his second tour, and a disaffected draftee)
who battle it out in Vietnam in 1970 in a 196th Light Infantry
Brigade company. For more info, go to www.359andawakeup.com
David
O. Ferrier’s in-country war novel, Self
Inflicted Wounds (1stBooks, 373 pp., $14.95, paper), is based on his
two tours of duty flying dustoffs in Vietnam with the 571st
Medical Detachment in Phu Bai and Nha Trang from 1967-69,
as well as on his work as an outreach counselor for the Anaheim,
California, Vet Center. To find out how to get an autographed
copy, e-mail the author, a VVA member, at ferrier_dave@yahoo.com
Korean
War veteran Eugene Basicili’s novel, Hunting
With Tigers (iUniverse, 314 pp., $19.95, paper), is
based on events that took place during the 1968-69 Vietnam
War tour that his brother, Special Forces Command Sergeant
Major Richard A. Basilici, had with the super-secret
CIA Detachment
B-57, Project Gamma. Christopher Goffard’s Snitch
Jacket (Rookery, 263 pp., $24.95) is supposed to be a comic novel,
but I didn’t find much to laugh about in this ultra-noir
tale that features a Hell’s Angel-like Vietnam veteran
nicknamed “Mad Dog” who wears “a necklace
of human ears.” No surprise that Mad Dog gets involved
in a murder-for-hire scheme and much mayhem ensues.
VVA Member
Theodore Carl Soderberg puts his many years of service in
the U.S. Navy and Merchant Marine to good use in his engaging
novel Uncharted Waters (PublishAmerica, 230 pp., $19.95,
paper), which is set during Operation Desert Storm.
Retired
Army Col. Thomas R. Glodek offers his ideas about why the
United States did not prevail in Vietnam in fictional form
in The Advisory Team (Vantage, 357 pp., $23.95). Glodek served
as a MACV intel adviser in Vietnam in 1968-69.
THE LOST BATTALION
REDUX
Charles A. Krohn, who retired as a U.S. Army LTC, was on
the ground and in the thick of things as a young intelligence
officer with the 1st Cav’s 2nd Battalion/12th Cavalry
during the fierce fighting that took place during Tet ’68
near Hue. In the early nineties Krohn wrote The Lost
Battalion: Controversy and Casualties in the Battle of Hue,
an outstanding book about how his battalion was surrounded
by 2,000 NVA, and then, of all things, was ordered to attack
without any air or artillery support.
That evocative book
shows in stark detail how the 2/12th survived a murderous
NVA assault and at great cost routed the enemy. The book,
published in 1993, was reviewed in our May-June 1994 issue.
To
mark the 40th anniversary of Tet, Naval Institute Press,
in cooperation with the Association of the United States
Army, has published The Lost Battalion
of Tet: Breakout of the 2/12th Cavalry at Hue (208 pp.,
$23.95), a revised paperback edition of Krohn’s gripping
account. In it, Krohn makes some corrections (the KIA figure
for the unit was 81, not 60, for example), additions, and “adjustments
of interpretation,” as
he puts it. And he brings his “lessons learned” up
to date from the first Persian Gulf war to the current wars
in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Krohn believes that “inexperience,
arrogance, and historical ignorance” on the part of
our civilian and military war planners were responsible for
what happened in the Vietnam War. Those words, he says, also
may be applied to the planning that went into the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq.
MAULDIN ON NAM
Todd DePastino’s Bill Mauldin:
A Life Up Front (Norton,
370 pp., $27.95) is an engaging biography of the iconic,
iconoclastic World War II combat cartoonist. It contains
an interesting account of Mauldin’s experiences in
Vietnam in 1965 and his thinking about the war in the ensuing
years. In Pleiku on assignment for the Chicago Sun-Times
(and also visiting his Army helicopter pilot son Bruce),
Mauldin witnessed first hand the historic February 7 VC attack.
That’s the one, along with a parallel attack at Qui
Nhon, that led to the Johnson administration’s escalation
of
the war.
Mauldin, who was lukewarm about the Vietnam War before
he arrived in country, turned hawkish after seeing the war
in person. He changed his mind two years later and became
an out-and-out dove after witnessing the police riot at the
1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Mauldin,
who died in 2003 and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery,
was especially critical of the Nixon administration’s
war policies.
“He fiercely resisted being labeled ‘liberal’ or ‘left-wing,’” DePastino
writes. “I think he’s somewhere in the stew of
Jeffersonian Conservative, Populist, Libertarian,” a
friend of Mauldin’s said.
SPORTS IN 1970
Tod Papageorge’s American Sports,
1970, or, How We Spent the War in Vietnam is a stunning
book of photographs that the celebrated Yale University professor
took primarily at baseball and football stadiums around the
continental United States during that tumultuous year. More
than 4,200 Americans lost their lives in Vietnam in 1970,
and things were tense at home, especially following the May
National Guard shootings at Kent State University.
Papageorge
turned his lens on the sporting scene in the 100-plus stark
black-and-white images in this book. But these are far from
Sports Illustrated glory-of-sport photos. Instead, what we
get are images of mostly grim, passionless spectators who
seem to embody the national zeitgeist of the Nixon era. The
photos “aren’t lyrical, stagy or solid,” Tim
Davis writes in an essay in the book. “They are difficult
and enraged, and derive their casting, awkward forms from
no previous pictures of things, but from a dire need to describe
the suppressed rage arcing through the American populace.”
NONFICTION
IN BRIEF
When I tell you that U.S. Army Infantry (Universe/Rizzoli,
343 pp., $75) is a big book, I am not being metaphorical.
This handsome collection of essays, photos, artwork, and
memorabilia—a reader-friendly illustrated history of
American infantrymen from 1775 to today—is physically
big. It’s a coffee-table-and-a-half book that is literally
weighty. You can do bicep curls with it.
The book, edited by Gen. Jerry A. White, has a six-page section
on the Vietnam War. “Like Korea,” retired Army
Col. William T. Bowers writes, “Vietnam was largely
an infantry war of infantry battles and casualties, fought
on the ground in challenging terrain.”
Walt Rostow,
the national security adviser who played a prime role in
shaping Vietnam War policymaking under Kennedy and Johnson,
was an out-and-out hawk until the day he died in 2003. British
foreign policy professor David Milne does a fine job sketching
Rostow’s life and work in America’s
Rasputin: Walt Rostow and the Vietnam War (Hill & Wang,
352 pp., $26).
Milne shows that Rostow was a brilliant man,
but that he also suffered from the unbending arrogance that
was rampant among too many of those who got us into the Vietnam
War and dictated its strategy. “Rostow’s unshakable
confidence—his
lack of intellectual curiosity—played a large part
in making a war that was misguided in its conception,” Milne
concludes, “and that produced uniformly bleak consequences.”
In
his 13th and latest book, military historian Geoffrey Perret
makes a case that Presidents Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and
George W. Bush had something in common as they pursued three “wars
of choice.” Those chief executives
took us into war in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq, Perret says,
in “a time of high emotion” and all three “acted
on their own visceral responses, ignoring the advice of the
military and of major allies.” Those wars, Perret contends
in Commander in Chief: How Truman,
Johnson, and Bush Turned a Presidential Power into a Threat
to America’s Future (Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 436 pp., paper, $17.50), were “all
launched at moments of national crisis, all of them unwinnable.” And
all of them contributed to, as his long subtitle indicates,
declining American influence on the world stage.
Carl Oglesby
was deposed as president of the radical antiwar group SDS
because he was against violent protest or, in the words of
the organization’s leadership, he was a “hopeless
bourgeois liberal.” Oglesby recounts his time enmeshed
in upper echelons of the peace movement in Ravens
in the Storm: A Personal History of the 1960s Antiwar Movement (Scribner,
336 pp., $25), a very readable memoir and an insightful one.
The book contains interesting details of a trip the author
made to Saigon and Hue in the summer of 1965, as well as
an insider’s look at the machinations of the people
who controlled SDS and much of the American antiwar movement
from 1965-70.
Wayne Mutza’s Green Hornet:
The History of the U.S. Air Force 20th Special Operations
Squadron (Schiffer,
134 pp., $35) is a well-written, heavily illustrated look
at the little-known USAF helicopter squadron that supported
secret operations conducted by the famed Studies and Observation
Group (SOG) in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. Mutza,
who has written several books on military aviation topics
(including Loach! and The A-1 Skyraider in Vietnam), served
as an Army airborne infantryman and helicopter crew chief
in Vietnam.
John J. Gebhart’s LBJ’s Hired Gun:
A Marine Corps Helicopter Gunner and the War in Vietnam (Casemate,
384 pp., $32.95) is a memoir of the author’s two years
(1965-67) in Vietnam, during which he went on 240 combat
missions. Gebhart looks back on his war time in ultra-gung-ho
fashion, noting that he “loved all the shooting,” the “endless
missions and excitement, the booze, whores, tropical paradise,
and all the men I fought with.”
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©2006-
2008, Vietnam Veterans of America. All Rights Reserved. 8719 Colesville Road, Suite 100, Silver Spring, MD 20910